getting out of x

[Rudi Chiarito]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 10:13:30AM -0600, Steven P. Ulrick wrote:
> "ctrl-alt-f1" through "ctrl-alt-f6" will take you to a non-graphical
> mode, but I think that that doesn't actually kill X.

I think the original poster might have run into one of those situations
when X tries to start over and over - and over again. As soon as you
switch to one of the consoles and type a few characters, X switches to
vt7 again, just to fail once more and so on. Entering the username in
such cases gets annoying; entering the password borders on the
impossible or desperate. The quickest options are rebooting (preferably
in runlevel 1/3) or connecting through SSH/terminal.

GDM has - or used to have - code to detect if X has been restarted too
many times in too short of a time, but it doesn't seem to be effective
all the time.

I haven't had the time to research it, but I think that a way to get X
into such problems is to kill nscd and log out of the current session.
Somebody might want to look into it.

Rudi